


Witch Sister

by Burning_Nightingale



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, Sister-Sister Relationship, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:43:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Burning_Nightingale/pseuds/Burning_Nightingale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edith goes through a chest of Sybil's old things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witch Sister

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on this comment meme: http://moetushie.livejournal.com/611280.html
> 
> This prompt was actually very easy to write. I hope I haven't made Edith horribly OOC, I've actually never written her before. I don't think it's particularly creepy, though it was supposed to be...

 

A strange stillness permeated the whole room, as if it were trapped in time, the memories wrapped up in spider-silk cotton and preserved for time immortal. The excess noise of the house fell away as soon as the door clicked softly closed, and an oppressive silence fell. The silence was heavy, muffling, watching. The kind of stillness and quiet that made the hairs on the back on your neck stand on end.

Edith told herself she was just being silly, attaching her still tumultuous emotions to a perfectly ordinary – if a little melancholy – bedroom. She moved further into Sybil’s old room; she had come here today with the express intention of clearing out her sister’s old things, and she wasn’t going to let superstition put her off.

Her feet made no sound on the carpet as she moved around to the end of the bed and lifted the lid of the large trunk that stood at its foot. Here, she knew, Sybil had stored many keepsakes and tokens of times gone by. She smiled as she pulled out an old shoe, and a little stuffed doll, and a pocket mirror with cracked glass. Memoirs of a life lived.

Edith wiped her eyes and assured herself it was simply the dust disturbed from these neglected keepsakes that made her eyes water.

She laid these things aside and dug deeper. The trunk was only half full, and under the thin layer of items there was a huge collection of letters. Edith scanned a couple; answers and replies to and from childhood friends, letters their parents had sent back when they had been on holiday, various notes, and was that a love letter? Edith picked it up and scanned it curiously. From one of the boys in the village, how sweet. She checked for a date, but it was unmarked.

Edith dug further under the letters, then flinched backward in surprise. Something sharp had pricked the end of her finger. A bead of bright blood welled up on the pad of her index finger; she sucked on it for a moment before turning her attention, more carefully this time, to whatever lay underneath the letters.

She lifted a section of the letters away to reveal what was underneath, and frowned. She could see clearly what had pricked her finger; a long, wicked-looking dagger was lying unsheathed on a bed of herbs, glinting in the light. Around it she could see jars of unidentified substance along with little bunches of dried plants held together with twists of twine. Packed in around the edges of the trunk were thick books with heavy leather covers.

Cautiously, Edith reached out a hand and picked the dagger up by the hilt. It had a ruby inlaid into the pommel and artful metalwork curling all over it. She looked once more in the trunk, but she couldn’t see a sheath for it.

A strange suspicion was starting to roil in her gut, but she could barely face it. Her hand trembled slightly. She knew she should confront this head on; and for that reason, she reached out boldly and before she could think better of it, pulled a book from the trunk and scanned its title and contents.

_Spells For The Modern Age_ claimed to contain a mix of new and innovative incantations and favoured and essential classics. Perturbed, Edith put the book down and reached for another. This was _The Brewer’s Guide To Field Plants Of England_ , which seemed harmless until it began to list things such as which herbs were good for love potions and which were better for the kiss of death. The next book Edith tried was entitled _Enticement Of The Dark Arts_ , and she could only read the contents before she dropped the book as if it had burned her.

_Witchcraft_ , whispered a traitorous voice in her mind.

She wanted to deny the evidence, but it was plain here in front of her. Sybil, her little sister Sybil, had been engaging in studies of…dark, dark things.

Edith had no idea what to do with the things she had discovered, so she shoved them hastily back into the trunk, wishing she could thrust them from her mind quite so easily. She re-covered them with the letters and closed the lid of the trunk, leaving the pile of keepsakes on the floor. She resolved to come back to them when she had had time to think; though when they might be, she could not say.

To satisfy a morbid curiosity that came upon her when she was almost out of the room, Edith doubled back and opened the door of the wardrobe where Sybil had once kept her clothes. She poked it and knocked the wood, and when she applied pressure the back of the wardrobe came away in her hands.

Installed behind it was a long pole of wood with a perfectly arranged and coifed thicket of twigs tied neatly to one end.


End file.
